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React 15.5 release, Building a chess game with React & Firebase and High Performance Progressive Web Apps

The biggest news this week is React 15.5 was released. It includes warnings for using React.createClass and React.PropTypes. While your app will still function if you use them, it wise to start migrating now so your app will be ready when React 16 comes out.

Other good stuff in this newsletter:

A code mode for helping you migrate React.createClass and PropTypes

A higher order component for determining window sizes

A tutorial on building a chess game with React

A blog post discussing how to improve performance in progressive web applications

The biggest change in React 15.5 is that React.PropTypes and React.createClass are extracted into their own packages. Both are still accessible via the main React object, but using either will log a one-time deprecation warning to the console when in development mode. These warnings will not affect the behavior of your application. However, they may cause some frustration, particularly if you use a testing framework.

While the warnings may cause frustration in the short-term, proactively fixing warnings ensures you are prepared for the next major release. If your app produces zero warnings in 15.5, it should continue to work in 16 without any changes.

Huge thanks to the React team for their efforts in making migrations to new versions as painless as possible!

Videos

Panel discussion with Ben Alpert, Dan Abramov, Lee Byron and Christopher Chedeau led by Robbie McCorkell. With Reason and Web Assembly on the horizon for use in building web applications is JavaScript still necessary? Find out what this panel thinks in this video from React London 2017

Creating a fast web application involves many cycles of measuring where time is wasted, understanding why it’s happening, and applying potential solutions. Unfortunately, there’s never just one quick fix. Performance is a continuous game of watching and measuring for areas to improve. With Twitter Lite, small improvements were made across many areas: from initial load times, to React component rendering (and prevention re-rendering), to image loading, and much more. Most changes tend to be small, but they add up, and the end result is one of the largest and fastest progressive web applications.

This week, Facebook merged a monster pull request into React that replaced its existing build process with one based on Rollup, prompting several people to ask ‘why did you choose Rollup over webpack’?

Rich Harris dives into the differences between the two and why you would pick one over the other.

Code

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